Richard F. Burton

The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night

Editor’s Note to this Web Edition

Burton’s The Book of The Thousand Nights and a
Night was originally privately published by The Kama Shastra
Society, in ten volumes, in 1885. (A further six volumes were
subsequently published as a Supplement to the Nights.)

This web edition has used the online plain-text transcription
from Project Gutenberg <http://gutenberg.org> — in
which most volumes are noted as "Privately Published by the Burton
Society". Edition details are otherwise sketchy. Unfortunately, the
Project Gutenberg transcription contains many errors (either from
typing or OCR conversion). Many of these errors have been corrected
here, but some undoubtedly remain. The Editor will be pleased to
receive any notifications of errors found.

In creating this web edition, some organisational changes have
been made from the original. Most obviously, the division into ten
volumes has gone, and this edition is published as a single piece.
The original division into volumes was deemed of no relevance to
the text, especially in as much as tales were split between
volumes. The dedications in each of the original volumes have been
retained, and collected together at the beginning of the
edition.

The second obvious change is to footnotes, which occur at the
foot of each page in the original. The transcribers of the Project
Gutenberg version had collected all footnotes together at the end
of each volume. In this web edition, I have relocated footnotes to
the end of each section of text, placing them as near as practical
to the reference point without overly interrupting the flow.

Thirdly, I have grouped the text into sections, in two ways:
first by starting a new section at the start of each tale; second
by starting a new section at the start of each new night. The whole
collection of tales is then arbitrarily split into parts, so that
each part is no more than 100,000 bytes long — this purely
for the convenience of readers, who may find larger pieces to be
too big a bite at one time.